Monday, May 20, 2013

Game of Thrones is Boring

BORING.

I’m
pretty sure Game of Thrones is my
favorite show. I say “pretty sure” because it’s boring. I’m as sure that it’s
my favorite show as I am that it’s boring.

“What
do you mean, boring? What about all the tits and violence? Just this last week
there was like six tits and two beheadings and a crazy ice man. That one crazy
lady put a leech on that one guy’s dick. The funny little guy got drunk and
said something mean to King Joffrey. Boring? Are you crazy?”

I
just mean it’s still only a TV show. I’m sorry. I am as surprised as anybody
else is about this. I paid for HBO for the express purpose of being able to see
this show. But then I forget about it all week long and Sunday comes around and
I think, “Oh good, Game of Thrones is on tonight,” and I put it on and there
are long stretches when I forget it’s on television and I get up and walk away
and go do something else. After like eleven minutes of dicking around with my
fantasy baseball team I think, “Wait a minute, what was I just doing?” And the
answer is I was in the middle of watching my favorite TV show. “Oh yeah, I’m watching Game of Thrones. Oh Goody.”

This
could be an attention span problem. It could also be a problem with television
as a medium. Maybe the problem is some convoluted cultural musing about how
media is consumed in 2013, and how excitement for the idea of the thing takes
on its own momentum and rips free of the context of the actual thing itself. It’s
probably more likely that I’m changing and growing impatient with entertainment
options which require any form of endurance on the part of the audience. I take
exception to that. I don’t work for you. You’re a TV show. You work for me.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so capricious, but it’s my time on Planet Earth, and I get
to decide what to do with it. Maybe is the problem. Maybe the root cause of
this is the hopelessly diffuse story.

“Well
have you read the books?”

I’ve
read the books. I like the books. They are also boring. The main point of them
seems to be to impress upon the reader that life in medieval times was brutal
and cheap, and that magic and wonder are often more terrifying than uplifting,
and that simple pleasures are all anybody has to fall back on. For every lightning
flash of Daenerys intrigue, the reader is forced to mire through interminable
passages of Sansa Stark getting her feelings hurt. We are expected to have
faith that our patience will be rewarded. Sansa will either become formidable
in some way that Daenerys already is, a redundancy, or else she won’t, and we’ll
be expected to forgive all the lugubriousness of her storyline as a grand blind
alley or a heartbreaking Anne Frank allegory.

George
R.R. Martin paints himself into corners. Using blood. And then, often, he just
walks away, leaving sticky bloody footprints all over everything. I want badly
for everything to tie together into the same nice neat little narrative, but it
can’t. The world of Westeros is too complex. Everybody in it is going to have
to die before everything settles down to the level it was at before Robert Baratheon
visited Winterfell. Also: while talking about Game of Thrones, you end up saying things like “before Robert Baratheon
visited Winterfell.” It’s too much.

“But
Arya…”

Yeah
man. And Bran. And a million other things. I know. I know what’s going to
happen, and I can’t wait to see it. That’s the whole appeal of the TV
show. It’s a long series of “oh yeah I forgot about that”s and “I don’t think
it was like that in the books, maybe I should go back and check”s. Really I
think Martin is using the TV show to make his next two novels into the biggest
selling books since Gutenberg printed the bible. That guy is going to be
ROLLING in it. That's the real incredible journey we're all on. When you play the Game of Thrones, either you win or you die, but before that you definitely make George R.R. Martin into a billionaire.

And
then once it’s all done, we’re going to be standing around scratching our heads
trying to remember what all the fuss was about like we do now anytime the Harry
Potter movies are on HBO. I have HBO now. Harry Potter is always on it. I dare
you to sit and watch a whole Harry Potter movie all the way through. You won’t
be able to. You’ll find yourself dicking around with your fantasy baseball team
for huge swaths of it. Because it’s boring.

3 comments:

The editing is annoying and the pace is cruelly slow. Whenever anyone says: "Oh, just wait until!.." they really mean that there will be literally one minute of the good stuff, but before then it's all build-up with the most banal dialogue you can dream up, while you wake up...from the slumber it just put you through.

Honestly, the writing is awful, and the show obviously relies on set pieces more than anything. Writers, want a tip? Less is more! Watch some older movies. Think about efficient ways to get scenes done without sacrificing the plot, pace, and acting.

Example: The Empire Strikes Back had a love story that had depth and and did not intrude on the larger narrative. Attack of the Clones did the opposite of Empire's formula.